This week’s free slide decks are fun virtual picnic therapy activities that can be used to encourage motor skills in therapy sessions. I love the picnic theme for the upcoming warmer weather this summer, but also as a fun way to spend the last few weeks of the school year. Kids will love this virtual picnic in therapy or at home! Also be sure to grab this left right discrimination picnic theme slide deck.
Virtual Picnic
When you use this virtual picnic to facilitate gross motor skills, kids can move, strengthen core stability, work on bilateral coordination, crossing midline, motor planning, eye-hand coordination, body awareness, muscle memory, and many other skills.
Plus, the virtual picnic activities includes a visual perceptual skills activities, and picnic handwriting activities.
These virtual picnic activities go hand-in-hand with picnic crafts, fine motor activities, mindfulness activities, making a full week of camping themed or picnic themed fun for kids.
Combine the picnic therapy activities on this slide deck to some other, hands-on picnic themed activities to round out the therapy theme:
- Backyard sensory diet activities
- Ant crafts for kids
- Outdoor lawn games for kids
- ABCs of Summer Learning
- Summer Sensory Seating (use a beach ball at your picnic!)
- Outdoor Phonologic Awareness Activity (great for auditory processing skills!)
And, when you have a picnic, making picnic foods with kids is a must…further building fine motor skills, cognitive skills like planning, preparation, impulse control, and other executive functioning skills, and independence in daily tasks! Try these cooking with kids activities that help to build skills, but are GREAT picnic foods for kids to make:
- Frozen Fruit Kabobs
- Peanut Butter Rice Crispy Treats (or skip the PB!)
- Fruit Tray and…
- Jam and Greek Yogurt Fruit Dip
- Sandwiches
Kids can participate in the virtual picnic by making one of these cooking activities (as long as they have a helper at home for their cooking activities) or, make pretend food and work on direction following, sequencing, planning, and task completion.
So, you can use these ideas to combine therapy recommendations for the home OR use these ideas in therapy sessions to create picnic themed therapy activities!
Want to add virtual picnic activities to your sessions or home programming? This week’s free slide deck covers several different occupational therapy intervention areas (and are great for physical therapy sessions, too.)
Picnic Gross Motor Activities
The first part of the slide deck includes picnic gross motor activities.
Kids can look at the image on the slide deck and pick out one piece of visual information in order to act out the picnic scene. Each picnic scene includes several people that are in various gross motor positions to challenge core strength, coordinatin, midline crossing, bilateral coordinaiton, motor planning, and more.
Kids can also work on visual perceptual skills such as visual discrimination, visual figure ground, visual closure, etc.
Children can then use this part of the slide deck to foster muscle memory, visual memory, and sequencing. You could go through this part of the slide deck several times and work on recalling physical motor sequences or play a memory game. The slides are pretty open-ended to facilitate a number of goal areas when it comes to gross motor skill, coordination, visual skills, etc.
Picnic Handwriting Activities
The next several slides in the slide deck are open-ended picnic writing prompts. There are more picnic scenes that include a variety of picnic items.
Children can scan the image and pull out words to write on paper, or they can use the list on the slide deck to copy and then find the hidden items in the picture.
To grade this activity, ask kids to compose a sentence using the picnic words on the slide. Or, ask children to circle the items on the slide using a shape feature on Google slides. These activities challenge the visual perceptual skills and visual motor skills needed for handwriting and copying written work.
Use these picnic handwriting activities to focus on letter formation, spacing, sizing, and overall neatness in handwriting skills.
Free Virtual Picnic Slide Deck
Want to add this virtual picnic slide deck to your therapy toolbox? Enter your email address into the form below to access this slide deck. Don’t forget to check out all of the Free Slides that we have available for teletherapy and for facilitating therapy sessions with kids!
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
